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Amazon Kindle Fire 2 landing August 7th?

A sucessor to the Kindle Fire will go on sale in early August, insiders claim, as a flurry of new Android challengers arrive bidding to break the iPad’s hegemony of the tablet market.

According to Amazon supply-chain sources cited by China Times, the Kindle Fire 2 will ship on August 7th. Assuming the tablet’s previously mooted launch date of mid-July is correct, that gives a potential lead-in period of three weeks or so to get the device to market.

The site’s tell-tales also claim that it will be a single slate that will be unveiled and that its dimensions will be in line with the seven-inch Kindle Fire. That dashes hopes - temporarily anyway - that we are also due a higher-end model with a larger screen.

Amazon is also expected to retain the original Kindle Fire’s keen price point. This seems especially likely in the light of the price of Google’s Nexus 7 slate, which is up for pre-order now from just £159 and is Amazon's largest rival in the previously mostly uncontested cheap slates sub-division of the market.

Other details remain fairly thin on the ground. However, the Kindle Fire 2 is expected to dispense with a home button, pack a microUSB port and run the Ice Cream Sandwich version of Android.

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